White Chocolate Mud Cake Pops

There is a bit of a fun story behind these…A few weeks ago a friend of mine sent me a picture of rainbow cake pops, suggesting that I make them some time. I explained that it wasn’t something I was able to do because I didn’t own a cake machine. A couple of days later, I was working away and my boss came into the office carrying a box wrapped in black plastic with my name on it,? I had no idea what it was, but when I opened it … CAKE POP MACHINE! I have some pretty cool friends, right? YAY!That could only mean one thing … time for baking!I originally came up with this elaborate plan, but I didn’t have the energy for that. Also, I have never done them before so I thought it would be best to keep it simple. I raided my baking cupboard at home and discovered I had a whole heap of white chocolate melts so it was an easy decision to make: White Chocolate Mud Cake Pops with White Chocolate icing.These are the ingredients for the cake …

100g melting white chocolate

175g butter

1 cup caster sugar

½ cup milk

1 cups plain flour

¼ cup self-raising flour

1 egg

For the icing …

300g melting white chocolate

1 tsp vegetable oil

Sprinkles!

Did you know that poultry and dairy work in baking a lot better when they are at room temperature? So the very first thing I do when I bake is get all of my ingredients out of the fridge/cupboard and put them aside to come to room temperature.

Now usually, this is where I go on about turning the oven on to get it preheated. However, the cake pop machine only takes a few minutes to heat so I waited till the end for this step, I didn’t want a hot machine waiting on my counter for longer than it needed to be.Batter time :)

In a medium saucepan, melt the chocolate, butter and milk together. Gently stirring to make sure everything melts evenly and doesn’t begin to cook.

When everything beings to be more liquid than solid, add in the sugar and stir while it all melts together

Transfer the mixture into a large bowl and leave to cool for 15-20 minutes

Sift in the plain flour and self-raising flour. The sifting helps to separate any clumps in the flour before it is mixed in the liquid mixture.

Mix together, making sure there are no clumps left.

Add the egg and mix everything together.

Now it’s time to use my cake pop machine! According to the instructions, it takes just 5 minutes to warm up so I left this till my batter was ready but it meant I had a few minutes to wait for the little green light to tell me it was ready …

Yay!I read the instructions before using the machine, as well as a few different online articles, so that I knew how best to use the machine. This told me that it was best to just about fill the hole in the base tray and cook for 4-6 minutes.First batch went alright; the base was browned but the tops looked quite nice. Although I did have to find a trick to get the balls out of the machine without breaking. What I worked out was using a wooden spoon to gently roll the cake ball out of the tray into the middle space and then use some paper towel to pick up and move the ball onto my baking paper to cool.I had to test out a few different options with both amount of batter and timing. By the end I decided that filling the holes to with just a few millimetres space at the top and cooking them for 7 minutes got a nice firm ball with the top starting to brown.

When preparing for baking these cake pops, I had no idea how to adjust the amounts of my white chocolate mud cake recipe so I decided to make the entire batch as a reference for future. My biggest advice for you when making cake pops with a cake pop machine … HALF ANY CAKE RECIPE! I made 72 cake pops!!! Although when I took them to work they were gone quite quickly so maybe it was good to make that many.

To decorate the cake, I originally wanted to have white chocolate icing with some chocolate icing as extra decoration. But because the balls didn’t all quite come out perfect, I decided to use sprinkles to hide the boo-boo’s.I also don’t have Styrofoam or anything to hold sticks with cake pops on top so I knew from the start that I was going to have the cake pops at the bottom of the sticks. This made me think of canapés so I bought wood canapé sticks, wooden spoons and thick paper straws to use as my sticks.

One tip for cake pops that I didn’t know is that you dip the stick in icing before sticking it into the cake pop. It acts like a glue to hold everything together.So, now it was time to get my icing ready. We are going to double boil the chocolate on the stove.

Fill a saucepan with about 3-4cm of water and place a glass bowl on top, making sure the bottom of the bowl does not touch the water. The oil helps to thin the white chocolate a little as well as keep it melted a little longer.

Put the white chocolate and oil into the bowl and turn the stove to a low-medium heat.

Stir gently until the mixture is melted.

Turn the stove off but keep the bowl on the saucepan to keep the heat. This is especially important with white chocolate as it hardens quite easily.

We need to put the stick on first and let our icing “glue” set. So take a stick (or spoon in my case), dip the end 0.5-1cm in the icing and poke it in the top of a cake ball. Leave the ball on the baking paper to set.I let my balls find their own base as some had flattened slightly, then I poked the other end so that the final cake pops would stand straight.Keep going till all cake balls are done! Easy!I had so many balls that the icing was set on the first ones by the time I finished, but you may want to put yours in the fridge for a few minutes before icing just to be sure.

Finally time to decorate!

Prepare another tray with baking paper to put the finished cake pops on and clear some space in the fridge.

Pour sprinkles into a bowl.

One at a time dip a cake pop into the white chocolate mixture until it is covered. If your bowl isn’t deep enough, give the cake pop a twist in the mixture.

Take the cake pop out of the mixture and hold it above the mixture, slowly twisting the stick to allow excess icing to drip off and evenly coat the cake pop.

When the icing is starting to set and you are happy that the excess has all come off, gently dip the cake pop in the sprinkles bowl. I like to either “tap and twist” or pick up small amounts in my hand and sprinkle the sprinkles over. This will help avoid changing the shape of the icing and cake.

Put the finished cake pop on your tray

Keep going with all the rest!

Leave your finished cake pops somewhere cool (like the fridge if you live somewhere hot like me) until they are ready to be eaten.

Enjoy!!!I took these to work, there was so many I was certain that I would end up having to beg people to eat them or take them onto the street. But they were AMAZING! Everyone loved them and were taking two at a time. So they were all gone in less than three hours. Made me feel pretty good to be honest JLet me know what you think and I would love to see your photos either below or over on my Instagram @nerdylittlebaker​